wired.com — Working on shoestring budgets and short timelines, duct tape and tape measures, CubeSat enthusiasts build 4-inch square satellites and then piggyback their dreams on bigger missions? rockets. They do it dirty and cheap, but their results are competitive with their spendier counterparts.
May 19, 2009 View in Crawl 4
dlitMay 20, 2009
yess its all going according to plan, next ill be having my DIY space shuttle
zkmanMay 20, 2009
They just launched the PharmaSat and a CubeSat tonight from NASA Wallops in Virginia. Could see it from my house in the DC area.
jazzsaxMay 20, 2009
Interesting article, but Amateur Radio operators have been launching amateur satellites since 1961 on a shoe-string budget.
sykotikMay 20, 2009
I did not know about this site, though I won't claim to be very in tune with popular culture. At all.I appreciate you linking this, and you have been dugg!
gir1337May 20, 2009
These aren't exactly "DIY", "dirty and cheap" satellites. The NSF is granting $900,000 per project to build three of them ($300,000 per satellite), with majority of the projects coming from universities. Compared with industry full time employees, graduate students are cheap labor and undergraduates are typically free. The level of quality engineering is substantial. Being that I work on one of these projects the above description rather annoys me.
tryurtyu44May 21, 2009
The project is supposed to test the effectiveness of antifungals in killing microbes in space. It turns out that low-gravity conditions can do strange things to earthling cells, including making them more virulent. If we’re going to send humans, with their huge complements of bacterial ecosystems into space, we need to know how microbes react to the low-gravity environment.<a class="user" href="http://cialis-super-active.org">http://cialis-super-active.org</a><a class="user" href="http://female--viagra.com">http://female--viagra.com</a>While the PharmaSat project adopts some of the CubeSat methods, keep in mind that it still helps to have NASA behind you. The agency spent $3 million on PharmaSat, mostly bringing the rigor of the CubeSat up to NASA standards.
bigplrbearMay 23, 2009
it was somewhat related to the DIY shuttle idea that DLit suggested